Photography and geography

Abstract

The term ‘geographical imagination’, first suggested by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978), has come to signify the multiple ways in which sense of place permeates all aspects of social life. The aim of this collection of essays is to explore the instrumentality of photography in informing and mediating this phenomenon. Prompted in part by the growth of interdisciplinary interest in cultural studies, Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination is the first volume compiled by geographers to bring together writings from a wide range of disciplines on the connections between photography and geography. The twelve contributors are drawn from architectural history, American studies, archival studies, art history, cultural studies, history, sociology, visual anthropology, and cultural and historical geography. Their essays range over Europe, the USA, Canada, Palestine, Egypt, India, South Africa, Australia and the western Pacific, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The photographs, both amateur and professional, come from family albums, government reports and corporate archives. By their own admission, the editors have not attempted to unify such diversity under a single theoretical or methodological approach. They have, however, grouped the essays into three loosely thematic sections.